Under Construction @ Keele Vol. IV (1) | Page 26

analogy, just as magnolias cannot be reduced to one sex, neither can the speaker’s gender be essentialised, nor reduced to genitalia. But unlike her stepfather, Marissa does not discriminate on the basis of gender: she picks the speaker a flower and, metaphorically, as a friend regardless of hirs gender-nonconforming identity. Furthermore, by giving the speaker the magnolia blossom, Marissa simultaneously provides the speaker (and reader) with hope for a future in which others can accept his trans identity and see beyond the boundaries of binary gender. The titular poem “Boy with Flowers” continues the flower-as-body analogy, but in relation to the speaker’s adult body post-surgery. So far, this paper has focused on the speaker’s experiences pre-transition. But it will now explore how Shipley writes about the physical aspects of gender transition. In stanza 8, the naked body is put on display as we watch the speaker’s lover: … tracing fingertips
 around two long incisions in my chest. Each sewn tight with stitches, each a naked stem, flaring with thorns. 8 We live in a society in which judgments about one’s gender are often based on the appearance of one’s physical body. Over time these signifiers become exaggerated. Men tend to grow beards and women tend to develop breasts – and it only takes a quick glance at these attributes to confirm our opinions about a person’s gender. As a result, many trans people suffer a misreading of their gender identity and are left with a feeling of entrapment within the ‘wrong’ body—or rather trapped in society’s perceptions of that body. In the above scene, the speaker has undergone a double mastectomy in attempt to physiologically masculinise the body. The breasts have been removed, leaving a flat, masculine contour on which the lover can trace their fingertips. Having spent hirs whole life being misgendered, the breasts can no longer be read as absolute signifiers of the speaker’s ‘natural’ (read: socially assigned) femininity. In this sense, surgery has enabled the speaker to transform hirs body so that it visibly aligns with hirs internal and invisible sense of gender. 9 The scars reflect this process by physically and symbolically reversing the relations between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ characterising the poems thus far: the speaker’s internal body image of hirself as male has become externalised and facilitated through surgery, through the scars. But it is important to remember that this is just the beginning of the speaker’s transition, which Shipley signals 8 9 Ely Shipley, “Boy with Flowers,” in Boy with Flowers (New York: Barrow Street Press, 2008), 9. Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 115. 19